★★★★★
The stage for Alfie Boe’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival concert is dressed like a loading dock after soundcheck. Music cases are piled high, the wings are exposed, and the crew drifts in and out of view. It is a deliberate stripping back of theatre’s usual mystique. Not quite backstage, not quite front-of-house, but somewhere in between.
That is the point. Boe is not here as the tux-and-tails tenor, the West End monument, or the Jean Valjean whose Bring Him Home has become almost a sacred text for Les Misérables devotees. He wants to show the man behind the roles.
He arrives in a pale blue baggy shirt, navy skinny pants and white undershirt, dressed like he has wandered in from a Sunday afternoon at the pub in Lancashire. Then he opens his mouth and reminds everyone this apparently casual bloke can fill a theatre like a cathedral.
The early part of the show is built around family memory. Boe begins with the songs his father, a father of nine, would play during Sunday dinners, leaning into Italian classics including Mambo Italiano and Volare.
He encourages the crowd to sing along, then immediately exposes the great truth of audience participation. Everyone knows the chorus, almost nobody knows the verses. Boe teases them for it, but never cruelly. His rapport is laddish, warm and cheeky. He is a performer comfortable enough with his own gift not to hide behind solemnity.
That looseness becomes one of the night’s pleasures. He spotlights latecomers, steals phones from diehard fans in the front row who have travelled from China, takes photos of the band onstage, and hands a tambourine to an audience member as if the Festival Theatre has briefly become a family knees-up.
The show’s design does not always sit naturally inside the Festival Theatre’s formality. This is a room where audiences have been trained to sit still, keep their phones away and clap at the correct moments. But Boe spends the night trying to deprogram them.
As the show progresses, Boe leans further into the songs his father would apparently play after a few drinks: Lonnie Donegan skiffle, country standards, and King of the Road. It’s the sort of material that conjures a man dancing on furniture and serenading his wife. Boe keeps the house lights up for much of the show, urging the audience to drink, dance and loosen their shoulders.
Of course, Boe cannot fully escape Les Misérables, nor should he. The audience is dotted with Les Mis shirts, and when he jokes that he will not be doing much musical theatre, one audience member heckles that she wants her money back. He gives them Bring Him Home, and the phones come out. The air tightens.
For all the jokes and pub-session warmth, this is the moment that proves why Boe remains one of the great crossover voices. The lyric asks for tenderness; Boe gives it scale without crushing it.
Special guest Amy Manford brings a different kind of theatrical polish. Her I Dreamed A Dream is beautifully sung, though it does not quite build to the blazing emotional finale the song demands.
Manford’s long gold locks and evening gown frame her more as Christine from Phantom of the Opera than Fantine from Les Misérables, and that is where she truly lands. All I Ask of You is far more persuasive, drawing on the romantic sweep that made her such an apt fit for Phantom’s 40th anniversary staging on Sydney Harbour.
Boe’s own musical theatre detours are playful rather than reverent. You’ll Be Back from Hamilton comes with a terrific anecdote about playing darts with Lin-Manuel Miranda backstage on Broadway. Picture Jean Valjean and Alexander Hamilton in costume, throwing darts and drinking coffee. Hamilton, Boe admits, won at darts, but Valjean builds better barricades.
He also takes the chance to rib long-time collaborator Michael Ball, mocking Ball’s stage shimmy and flamboyance. The joke works because it contains affection, and because Boe knows the implicit punchline: Ball may have the moves, but Boe has the voice.
Few performers can move this easily between Pavarotti, Queen, Broadway, country and pub sing-alongs without seeming like a cruise-ship sampler platter. Boe makes range feel like identity.
That versatility becomes the show’s real argument. Musical theatre purists may have wanted a full night of standards. But anyone who has followed Boe’s recording career knows his tastes have always been broader than Valjean’s barricade. He gives the crowd Bring Him Home. Radiohead do not owe every audience Creep.
Instead, Boe strums a guitar through country numbers and turns Snow Patrol’s Run into stadium rock. The guitar solo howls; some greyer-haired audience members visibly clutch their ears. Yet the lyric, even if you cannot hear my voice, lands almost comically in a Boe concert.
Hearing Alfie Boe’s voice is never the problem. If anything, he is a one-man Live Aid: part opera house, part arena, part working men’s club.
The closing stretch goes full spectacle. A disco ball spins. Queen arrives in medley form: Radio Ga Ga, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions, and the theatre finally gives in.
Elsewhere, tributes to Elvis and Frankie Valli honour the artists who played the same casino circuits Boe has travelled through, folding his own career into a lineage of big voices, big rooms and songs engineered to survive decades.
The show includes one original track from his album Face Myself, but its deeper originality lies in its self-portrait. This is not a cabaret built around confession, trauma or collapse. Boe’s story, at least as told here, is simpler and perhaps rarer. A working-class boy made good. A singer whose talent moved him across class boundaries without sanding off where he came from.
The message is unfashionably direct but still powerful: if you have the voice, you should get the chance, no matter where you were born.
The production’s backstage conceit does not always perfectly match the Festival Theatre’s scale and etiquette, but that friction also gives the night its charm. Boe is trying to smuggle a stadium show, a pub session and a family photo album into a theatre.
Somehow, by force of humour, warmth and ridiculous vocal horsepower, he pulls it off.
Alfie Boe with Special Guest Amy Manford ran for one night only at the Festival Theatre on 7 June as part of the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
His multi-city Australian tour concludes in Brisbane on 9 June at QPAC.
Tickets are on sale for all Cabaret Festival shows now at the website.
Website: https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/
Photo credits: Claudio Raschella
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